Off-message voters elect Thatcher top Tory

David Cameron has spent much time as Conservative leader trying to persuade Tories to put the politics of Margaret Thatcher behind them. But last night in Birmingham the opposition leader suffered what could only be described as a rebuff when conference delegates voted her the greatest Tory hero of all time.

Fortunately for Cameron's efforts to reshape the public image of his party, the vote for Thatcher came at a Guardian fringe meeting rather than on the conference floor. The result, which came at the end of a debate in which the claims of Britain's first and, so far, only female prime minister were weighed against those of Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, was emphatic. Thatcher won with 97 votes, against 53 for Churchill, 52 for Burke and 18 for Disraeli.

Putting the case for Thatcher, her former political secretary John Whittingdale MP said her claims were unassailable. "She will always be remembered as the original conviction politician," he said.

She had carried out the biggest redistribution of wealth in modern British history by giving council tenants the right to buy their houses.

"Margaret Thatcher did not just change Britain in a way that was permanent," Whittingdale said. "She changed the world."

This latest Thatcher victory came in a contest organised by the Guardian, in which Conservative MPs voted four candidates on to the short list in the summer, leaving attendees at the fringe meeting to pick the winner.

The case for Burke was put by Michael Gove, shadow schools secretary, while David Willetts, shadow skills secretary, championed Disraeli and Lord Baker of Dorking, the former education secretary, spoke on behalf of Churchill. Thatcher's claims did not go unchallenged. "She was a remarkable force in British politics," said Baker. "But was she a Conservative? I doubt it. I never ever heard her use the word Tory. Never."

Thatcher's removal left a wound in the party that has taken nearly 20 years to heal, said Willetts.

Whittingdale acknowledged that his former boss was extremely divisive. "The strength of feeling about her today is almost as great as it was in the 1980s," he said. Nor did she have any sense of humour, he said.

When Whittingdale and the speechwriters wanted Thatcher to parody the Monty Python "dead parrot" sketch in an attack on the Liberal Democrats in 1990, she turned to Whittingdale and asked, in total seriousness: "John, this Monty Python. Are you sure that he's one of us?"